Imagery: Art for Wine

Imagery: Art for Wine

Bob Nugent, foreword by Donald Kuspit

“Subliminally, the label raises one's expectations of the wine: the uniqueness of the art anticipates the uniqueness of the wine…a rhetoric of display that enhances the value of what is already regarded as inherently valuable. Indeed, it is about the synergistic value-effect the convergence of things of intrinsic value—art and wine—can have.”
--Donald Kuspit, Wine And Art: The Grand Alliance

In 1985 winemaker Joe Benziger and Sonoma artist Bob Nugent struck on the idea of putting original art on special releases of Imagery Estate wines. The goal was straight-forward—commission the world's modern art luminaries to create works for reproduction onto wine labels. Two decades and 160 labels later, they have assembled a staggering collection of contemporary art, from the likes of Sol Lewitt, Terry Winters, Nancy Graves, John Baldessari, Judy Pfaff and Bob Arneson—ART FOR WINE.

This book highlights 133 works of art, the best of the Imagery collection. The images are big and lush, and accompanied by biographical sketches of the artists' careers, as well as a short description of their individual ideas and methods. The pictorial index shows the works in their label-form, from 1985 to the most recent vintages.

These images are evocations of wine's multi-faceted ability to inspire us.



$70.00 ISBN 1-891267-92-2
Hardbound, 308 pp., 11X11”
133 full-color prints, artist bios and statements
Gazetteer/Full-color label index